If There's a War, He's There

William Prochnau is working on a book for Random House about the small band of early Vietnam war correspondents.

Published: March 3, 1991

By William Prochnau—
Last summer, in the Jerusalem office of his Cable News Network, Ted Turner delivered one of those fiery take-no-prisoners pep talks for which he has become renowned throughout his far-flung empire. CNN, Turner exhorted his minions, is on the cutting edge of a communications revolution. He wanted troops who would hold back nothing, who would take the final step. "I want people," Turner finally thundered, "who are prepared to die for CNN!"

One young cameraman raised his hand sheepishly, a tentative volunteer. Peter Arnett just smiled at his boss's locker-room hype. At 56, Arnett had put his life on the line many times during a 30-year career that spanned 16 wars and insurrections. He did not raise his hand.

Six months later, of course, it was Arnett who leaned out a ninth-floor window of the Al-Rashid Hotel in downtown Baghdad to describe for the world the spectacular start of his 17th war, the aerial bombardment of Iraq. The next day it was also Arnett who stayed behind when all other Western reporters left.

Arnett, it is safe to say, has seen more combat than any other journalist in the world. Is he a war freak? Does he have a death wish? His old buddy from Vietnam, David Halberstam, dismisses those ideas. "War freaks don't last," Halberstam says. "Arnett may be the gutsiest man I know, but he calculates every risk he takes."

Once the attack on Baghdad started, Arnett refused to go to the hotel bomb shelter with the other Western reporters. Bernard Shaw, the CNN anchorman who was with Arnett that first night, recalls the scene: "When the Iraqis knocked on the door, Peter placed his chair in front of the window and sat down with his back to the antiaircraft tracers. He crossed his legs, started waving his arms and wouldn't budge. He said he had been bombed before. He said small places drove him crazy and he would rather be bombed. It was a remarkable show."

And a good bluff. When the Iraqi officials exited in exasperation, Arnett and his CNN colleagues were left alone with an open telephone line to Atlanta and an exclusive eyewitness story that crackled live around the world.

By morning, no one doubted what Arnett would do next. While about 40 other Western reporters -- many under orders from their news organizations -- headed for the Jordanian border, Arnett stayed behind. He understood the dangers: Not only would he be under air assault but, as the only Westerner reporting through heavy censorship from behind enemy lines, the personal fire would be hostile, too.

Alone in Baghdad, Arnett found himself with the story of a lifetime. But many back home didn't see it that way, questioning his loyalty and calling him a pawn of Saddam Hussein. "I've taken some flak," he said in a telephone interview 17 days after the war started. "So what else is new?" EVEN BEFORE THE bombs fell, Arnett had decided, as he put it, "to miss the bus." His boss, CNN executive vice president Ed Turner, knew as much and despaired of even trying to move him out. "Peter thinks he's bulletproof," Turner says.

Watching television, Nate Polowetzky, a former foreign editor of The Associated Press, must have thought he was seeing a rerun. During the fall of Saigon in 1975, Polowetzky also tried to move Arnett out of harm's way. "I told him to get out," Polowetzky recalls. "He told me, pretty clearly, to go screw myself."

A few hours later, Arnett was pounding away on his old Olivetti portable in A.P.'s Saigon office when a North Vietnamese major marched in. Arnett, who'd covered the war longer than any other correspondent, offered the invader a warm Coke and a cookie, interviewed him and sent out the story before his wires were cut.

A dukes-up kid from the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of the world, Arnett was perfectly cast for a war without heroes. A teen-age fistfight had left a broken nose pushed sideways across his face and a jaw set permanently in a challenging jut. He looked "like an Anglo-Saxon Belmondo," says one of his pals. "If you had to invent a reporter for the Vietnam War," Halberstam says, "you would have invented Peter."

Arnett, born in 1934 in a small whaling village on the southernmost point of New Zealand, started out with nothing below him but Antarctica. As a young man, he found college too confining and bummed around in newspaper jobs before taking a tramp steamer to Australia.

Still restless and bored, he boarded another ship in search of adventure. "I was the wide-eyed innocent," he says. "I was Kipling's Kim, watching out at the world." It was 1959 and Southeast Asia coursed with opium smugglers, revolutionaries and obscure little wars in obscure little kingdoms.

Fables glued themselves to Arnett early, and sometimes it is difficult to sort myth from truth. Some believe he inspired "The Year of Living Dangerously," the Australian film about war correspondents in Indonesia. That isn't so, though the Indonesian Government did kick him out of the country for his aggressive reporting.

One story, both true and much savored by colleagues, tells of the time that Arnett slept through a Laotian palace coup after a hard night on the town in Vientiane. The place was remote, and Arnett was the only reporter in town. Once he awoke, he blithely wrote stories for all three competing wire services and got congratulatory cables, and checks, from each.